T in the f***ing Park

I’ve been home from Thailand for over a week and I still haven’t posted anything about it here. I’ll rectify that soon, but in the meantime, some thoughts on T in the f***ing Park.

Last weekend was the festival’s 18th year and my eighth visit. I lost my T virginity in 2001 or 2002 I think. Back then it was all for fun – camping, reaching a sustainable level of drunkenness for an entire weekend, laughing at the dire bands, enjoying the good ones, not giving a shit if your tent was completely flooded. Did I mention the drinking?

Then in my student days I entered T exile, preferring to sample the offerings of Spanish festivals like Benicassim, Summercase and Primavera. But for the past four or five years I’ve been back at T in the much less fun capacity of music journalist. This obviously has its advantages – free ticket, access to the not-really-that-special hospitality area, less slumming it. But every year I quickly realise that T in the f***ing Park is almost impossible to really truly enjoy unless you’re in some state of considerable inebriation.

Still, when I wasn’t reviewing, tweeting or publishing this year I tried my level best at getting into the T spirit while sober. The Slam Tent proved the biggest challenge to overcome – Boots could learn something from the customer service techniques of its army of pill sellers. But there was no way I was missing Leftfield – an old favourite of mine – and I forced myself to bounce along with the hands-in-the-air hordes.

T in the f***ing Park gets a lot of stick from us music snobs. We dismiss it as a neds’ holiday, a celebration of knuckle-dragging, brutish drunkenness and rampant commercialism.

Okay, fair enough, but I’m getting a little tired of this sniping. It might not be to all of our tastes, but the undeniable fact is that 85,000 people turn up, have an evidently brilliant time and usually return the following year. To those who slate the choice of headliners or the mediocre pap that usually precedes it on the Main Stage, it’s a necessary evil if you want to stage a mainstream event and subsidise the smaller stages that host the genuinely exciting international acts and breakthrough Scots bands.

And you have to admire the level of organisation and professionalism that goes into just making it happen. It’s a premier league event, almost equal in scale to the likes of Glastonbury and Coachella, and Scotland cannot always claim to compete with the biggest and best of the world in other areas of life. This year, for the first time, I wondered whether we should actually be proud of T in the f***ing Park as a great Scottish event that doesn’t involve tartan or bagpipes (at least not as the main draw).

You might be thinking to yourself, ‘Yeah, but I bet he wouldn’t go if he had to pay a couple of hundred quid for a ticket’. And you’d be right. It would take a phenomenal line-up for me to part with that sort of cash, especially when I can get a foreign holiday with a festival included for a little more. But then maybe I’m just too old for it.

Or not old enough. I saw countless middle-aged couples at Balado this year, unashamedly joining the youthful majority in their lager-fuelled revelry.

Good on ‘em. Maybe I’ll be one of them in 15-20 years when T in the f***ing Park is approaching its 40th birthday.

But if I hear that chant of ‘Here we, here we, here we f***ing go’ one more time, I reserve the right to reverse all opinions expressed in this post.

Take a look at our T in the Park reviews and photos over on Radar.